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The process of driving traffic to your website is not to be taken lightly. It’s not easy, and it can be a very expensive and frustrating. However, it can also be extremely powerful because you can target your market and develop exclusive, qualified, pre-sold prospects from sources that nobody else is using.

In a previous article, I explained how to create your own lead generating website. Now let’s talk about actually getting people to your site. Anyone can build a follow-up sequence and a website, but getting people to the site is another thing entirely.

This process is not to be taken lightly. It’s not easy, and it can be very expensive and frustrating.

However, it can also be extremely powerful because you can target your market and develop exclusive, qualified, pre-sold prospects from sources that nobody else is using. If you do this correctly, you will be able to close more deals than ever because you'll be working with high-quality individuals who have high incomes.

Now let me reveal a caveat.This is not going to work well if you sell only low commission products. If you were going to sell term life insurance, then I would recommend that you be very careful about your approach. Your marketing expenses may not give you the return on investment you would need with low commission products.

What types of products do I recommend? Cash value life insurance and annuities. Also, I highly suggest you target business owners, where you can close cases that net major returns. That being said, let’s move on to how you go about doing this.

The first thing to consider when embarking on the process of generating prospects online is the type of person do you want to attract in the first place.

Assuming that we're going after cash-value and annuity prospects, it’s very important to understand the psychology of the individual. For example, I know some agents who work specifically with men and others who only work with divorced women. Other agents we’ve coached only work with politically conservative males who are interested in keeping their money safe.

Understanding your prospects first and foremost is critical.

Ask the question: What does my perfect prospect believe about money, religion, family or taxes? Go through the process to understand them thoroughly.

Secondly, where do they spend their time? Do they spend their time on Facebook or reading mommy blogs? Or are they in the financial section of the newspaper? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you need to do some research to find them, or ask your current clients.

Let’s say you are targeting business owners and you advertise in the classified section of a local website because it’s cheap and gets a lot of traffic. You could end up wasting a lot of money if the main people who visit that site aren’t your prospects.
Let me show you an actual case study of why this is so important. We initially started a campaign with an ad running on all pages of a popular local website. We spent a small fortune showing our message to tens of thousands of people.

After seeing the numbers, we realized that the best conversions came from the business and finance pages of the site. You will save thousands and thousands of dollars if you spend the time to go through this step so you can start advertising where your prospects are in the first place.

Now let’s talk about how to buy traffic. You want to be very careful about signing any contracts with online marketing companies who promise to put your banners up on websites to drive traffic to your site.

Do not sign a long-term contract — ever.

Your first campaign should be somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000, and the best place to go is to a local high-traffic website. Often, a news website is a great place to start. For example, www.nj.com in New Jersey is a local news site, but it’s also specific to that city and state. It’s a site where everybody in that local area goes to find out what’s going on.

Be careful with Google Adwords or content networks. Don’t worry about search engine optimization or all the other ways you can waste your money online. Start simple. Find the place where your prospects are, and put banners on those sites.

You’re going to start with banner advertising because you can pull qualified prospects from sites they are already visiting.

This is actually a very simple process. Once you’ve located the site you want to advertise on, contact their advertising department. They will likely send you their advertising rate card. Do not accept those prices. Those prices are for suckers; you need to negotiate
with them.

The first thing you want to negotiate is a test marketing campaign, and they'll usually have a special for first time advertisers. Tell them you need the cheapest rate possible to make sure you are getting the right return on your investment.

Let them know that you are a direct response marketer and that your budget is unlimited as long as you can get the return on investment that you need. From there, you will want to negotiate cost per impression (CPM). CPM actually means cost per thousand impressions. You’re going to want to get the best CPM price possible. CPMs can vary from site to site and market to market, so I can’t tell you what the best CPM price is. What I can tell you is that whatever they show on their rate card, it’s probably somewhere around 30 percent to 50 percent higher than what you should traditionally be paying.
You should probably contact two or three different sites and play them against each other on cost.

From there, you want to have them develop some banners for you if you don’t have the capability of doing them yourself. To get good ideas for banners, look at their site and see what the other banners look like and do the opposite.

If all they have is nice Flash, animation-type banners, then you probably want to do a black-and-white, text-heavy banner that looks dramatically different. The reason you want to be different is because people get “banner blindness.” You have to be substantially
different to get their attention and get them to click on the ad. Now this might sound kind of difficult to do, but it really isn’t.

The wrap
In a nutshell, you need to research the sites your prospects spend time on. Then contact their advertising department and negotiate the best rate possible. Have them develop a couple of banners for you, unless you can do them yourself or hire a graphic designer.

From there, run a test campaign and have them track your click-through rate — the percentage of people who see your ad versus those who click on it.

It’s important to monitor this because you want test five to 10 ads so you can use the one or two ads that are giving you the highest click-through rate. That’s a great way to start getting people to your site.

You may also want to find out if the website you are working with has an e-mail list. E-mailing can be extremely effective as long as the e-mail list is opt-in and legitimate.

So that’s the first step to getting people to your site. It’s almost like putting an ad in the newspaper — just a little bit more technical.

About the Author

We help Agents do 3 things:
1. Attract a consistent flow of appointments
2. Get affluent and qualified prospects to work with.
3. Say goodbye to the income roller coaster and create an income they can count on. More